Revealing Reality created multiple Roblox accounts, registering them to fictional users aged five, nine, 10, 13 and 40-plus. The accounts interacted only with one another, and not with users outside the experiment, to ensure their avatars’ behaviours were not influenced in any way.
Despite new tools launched last week aimed at giving parents more control over their children’s accounts, the researchers concluded: “Safety controls that exist are limited in their effectiveness and there are still significant risks for children on the platform.”
The report found that children as young as five were able to communicate with adults while playing games on the platform, and found examples of adults and children interacting with no effective age verification. This was despite Roblox changing its settings last November so that accounts listed as belonging to under-13s can no longer directly message others outside of games or experiences, instead having access only to public broadcast messages.
If you don’t watch what your kids play, your kids will find something inappropriate to play. This isn’t just a Roblox problem. Not suggesting Roblox shouldn’t have better moderation (holy hell should they) but this isn’t unexpected. Should it be? Maybe. Could they realistically do it? Probably not without some serious vetting changes—changes that would make “experience makers” have to wait to get their games approved.
Lock down the accounts so they can’t see server chat or get messages from randoms. Only allow your (parent) account to add friends. Play with them. Be present, at least somewhat, when they play.
Source: Play Roblox with my kids all the time.
I never had kids of my own, but seeing what my stepkids got up to from 2009-2016 (they were 6 and 7 to start), I became very worried about how things had shifted to online interaction. They wouldn’t have their own computers for another couple of years, but I gave them my netbook (remember those?) once I’d gotten a tower built (UPS drop-shipped my old one, and that’s not a euphemism … thank god I had the presence of mind to remove the hard drives).
It’s one thing to play SimCity for hours on end locally, which my parents allowed. It’s something entirely different to foist the whole of the internet on them without having concepts of online hygiene.